I don't use Discord myself, but I think their decision to use Discord is defensible even if I find it distasteful. Their support chat isn't meant to be a private space. (People discussing crimes and whatnot on Discord are using poor judgement.)

I think what they are trying to say there is that there is a lot of negative commentary on the Fediverse coming from people who are not users, and that they are not really beholden to those commentators. And that's true. They don't really have a history of smooth PR as far as I can remember.

I also think whether their acceptance AI usage is an overblown issue or not is completely unrelated to that comment, so I'm not sure why it would change your opinion of it.